· "Millions of people will die, writhing, turning blue, drowning in their own fluids and suffocating as foamy blood pours from every orifice." Such is the reassuring prediction from medical researcher AA Avlicino, author of Beat the Flu: How to Stay Healthy Through the Coming Bird Flu Pandemic (Vision). The avian flu virus is already spreading fast in one place - the publishing industry. Avlicino's effort is one of at least four bird flu books due out by Christmas, all from small publishing houses. Already spreading in bookshops is Mike Davis's The Monster at Our Door (New Press), a global scientific and political history of this "viral apocalypse in the making" (its cover features a terrifying rooster and masked medic). This week Icon produced Everything You Need to Know: Bird Flu, written in two weeks by John Farndon and edited in just a day and a half. On December 6 the Observer's health editor, Jo Revill, will put her name to Everything You Need to Know About Bird Flu and What to Do to Prepare for It (Rodale). Both Revill's and Farndon's efforts boast forewords by leading scientists, and their publishers insist they are not scaremongering. Such a claim may be harder for Vision, Avlicino's publisher, which bravely insists that "he doesn't whip up hysteria but tells it like it is".

· 'Tis the season for jumping ship. This week saw two established authors, William Dalrymple and Jim Crace, move to new publishers. Dalrymple is following his lifelong editor Michael Fishwick out of HarperCollins to new employer Bloomsbury. His five-book deal will span history and travel writing, starting with next autumn's The Last Mughal. A follow-up to the bestselling White Mughals, it will trace how the rich cultural exchange of the era was destroyed in the Indian mutiny of 1857, to be replaced by the racist evangelism of the high Victorians. Meanwhile, novelist Jim Crace is still looking for the sales figures to match his cult popularity. Quarantine won the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker, but since then Penguin has struggled to help him find the right readership. Part of the "marketing challenge" is the esoteric and indefinable nature of his output: The Devil's Larder was a sprawling gastro-erotic saga in 46 parts, while Six followed a fertile actor and singer across an imaginary city. Now Picador believes it has a solution: we'll see its strategy on release of The Pesthouse in spring 2007.

· John le Carré's Kenyan pharma-thriller The Constant Gardener, first published in 2001, is riding high in the charts because of the critical success of the film starring Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes. Now the production company behind the adaptation, Focus Features, has struck a groundbreaking partnership with Random House. Editors will comb Random's vast worldwide lists to find "gems" for screen adaptation; then the two companies will jointly adapt, produce and market the resulting films. It expects the partnership to result in two or three "smart, literate" movies a year - documentaries, comedies, classics or even horror or crime features. Focus certainly has a fantastic literary pedigree, including The Pianist, The Ice Harvest and the new Pride and Prejudice film. Random hopes the relationship will remove some of the frustrations of dealing with Hollywood - where option deals rarely bring results - and also shift more copies of adapted books.

· Sex sells more than ever. Inspired by the recent success of erotic writing by women, Orion is to launch an "upmarket" sexy fiction list. Under the Neon name it will reissue out-of-print novels, memoirs and short-story collections, and sell through sex chains such as Ann Summers. But bookshops, too, will want to stock many of the Neon titles; erotic writing has gone mainstream. Memoirs are most popular: callgirl Belle de Jour's "intimate adventures", French journalist Catherine M's orgiastic escapades, and Italian teenager Melissa P's innovative uses of a hairbrush. Of course such titles are still dwarfed by traditional erotica from Black Lace and Harlequin - marketed at women but bought mainly by men.